Purely for the amusement value

Purely for the amusement value

When I tell the story of how the Transylvanian Cookbook came to be, I make sure to mention the first translation of the recipe titles. Not having anyone handy who read fluent Hungarian, we fed the webpage listing all the recipe titles into Google Translate (you did know, right, that in addition to translating word by word, you can copy/paste the URL for a particular webpage into a Google Translate and it will do its best to translate it into whatever language you select? Just make sure to give it a few seconds, it can take time).

In any case, that’s where “Grim Reaper Cow Beef Juice” came from, for the second beef recipe (“Beef with Harvest Sauce”). But Google’s translation software DOES learn, and you no longer get Grim Reaper Cow Beef Juice. It’s now “Cow milk with cow’s milk”, which in some respects is even stranger, though less evocative.

So I made sure to archive a copy of all the Google-translated titles, lest I wake some morning to find that Google has achieved perfect idiomatic translation, and the humor would be lost. That would be a shame.

Enjoy the PDF! Do you have a favorite?

Google’s Translation of the Titles



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